


Thaw

by starcunning (Vannevar)



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: FDNH Apocrypha, First Do No Harm, Gen, Genji is mentioned, Reaper is mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-28 14:51:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8450623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vannevar/pseuds/starcunning
Summary: Angela had thought she was done attending Overwatch funerals. That was foolish—she was likely to outlive Wilhelm and Lindholm, if no one else. But this was a distress signal. She could belay this, with the proper support. That would require the type of quick thinking that small hours had never engendered. Jack moves, Gabriel had called them, with no apparent irony. She would only get about ten seconds before—The line rang.





	

The aging comm rattled across her nightstand, loud enough to wake the dead. Her first thought was one of hope: hope that it had all been a dream. Angela would have traded the last four years for another chance at one day. The last day her Overwatch comm had woken her, in fact.

She squinted against its light in the darkness, waiting for her vision to resolve. _Ecopoint: Vinson_ , it read, and she felt a stab of disappointment. She’d expected Grand Mesa, maybe Gibraltar. She’d been hoping for Geneva. Then she felt some guilt for it, shaking the thoughts from her head.

Angela took stock. She’d been to a few Ecopoints: Arica and Kilauea. Jack’s idea of a vacation. Amazing they’d never gotten caught. She’d never been to Vinson. Neither had Jack. Nor had Gabriel. Because …  
Because a polar mountain range wasn’t the type of place you visited without express invitation and very good reason. They’d lost a team there. _Mei-Ling Zhou._

Angela had thought she was done attending Overwatch funerals. That was foolish—she was likely to outlive Wilhelm and Lindholm, if no one else. But this was a distress signal. She could belay this, with the proper support. That would require the type of quick thinking that small hours had never engendered. _Jack moves,_  Gabriel had called them, with no apparent irony. She would only get about ten seconds before—

The line rang.  
“General Adawe,” Angela said as she engaged it.  
“Doctor Ziegler,” the other woman replied. “You will have just recieved the same transmission as I did, I think?”  
“Yes, ma’am,” Angela said, standing and stretching beside the bed. “Ecopoint: Vinson is our installation in Antarctica.”  
“I will remind you that Overwatch has been decommissioned. Under the Petras Act, no agent actions are authorized at this time.”  
“I could always call the Red Cross,” Angela said, exhaustion making her tone tart. “You and I are retired from working for the UN, Gabrielle. The team at Vinson doesn’t appear to have had that luxury.”  
“What are you saying?”  
“I’m saying that I took an oath long before you sent Commander Reyes to recruit me, and swore another one to Overwatch. My ethics do not permit me to do nothing, but I would rather work with the UN than against you.”  
“I will be lenient, given the late hour, but I must caution you against making any kind of threat again.”  
“These aren’t threats, General,” Angela said, taking a moment to compose herself. “What I am trying to make is a deal. My former employment with the UN came as a result of my expertise. That is the only proof I need that if you’ll be sending any sort of disaster response to a distress call at a former UN installation, I should be part of that team. Not as an Overwatch operative. You can keep the other agents out of it—you can even keep my name out of the thing entirely—so long as this is a UN operation.”  
Adawe sighed on the other end of the line. “I’m retired, Ziegler,” she said. “With honors. We should both be so lucky at the end of this thing. They’re scuttling a Candid out of Ushuaia in twelve hours.”  
“I’ll be on it,” Angela promised.

— — — — —

It was strange to think that she was more comfortable being airborne with nothing but her Valkyrie suit between her and the great blue void. Then again, the altitudes were generally less extreme. In Ushuaia, the UN had given her a bodysuit and hood that would proof her against the ice and winds of Antarctica’s interior. They’d also given her a more complete report of their understanding of the situation drafted by an ex-Ecopoint climatologist.

Their understanding of the situation, in short, was almost none at all. The Ecopoint had been destroyed in a storm not long before Overwatch’s dissolution. Summer, in Switzerland—a disastrous one, Angela remembered—was winter in the southern hemisphere, and the weather had not been kind. Flyovers had revealed nothing recoverable. Remote video and data access had proven impossible, their tenuous link to the outside world severed by the storm. Since Vinson had been declared lost with all hands, the Ecopoint had been silent. Until this distress call. Its particular code indicated a failure in cryogenic life support systems.

There was a good chance they’d find nothing more than corpses.

The landing strip was impossibly vast and blue, and it felt like the wheels of the jet slid along it for a very long time. The mountains rose in the distance as though chiseled coarsely from the landscape. It reminded her of the photographs Genji Shimada had sent her when he had arrived in Nepal. She would write to him, she decided, though an impulse flooded her like frost in her lungs to visit instead.

Every breath cost her warmth and wet, so conversation was a luxury with too high a cost. Her team remained strangers to her. Their kit, UN-azure, was almost like camouflage against the glacial background. The only manmade structures Angela saw during the whole of her trek were the cargo jet they’d left behind and the installation they climbed toward. In her time with Overwatch, she had seen wonders of human making; enough to balance out the horrors she had also borne witness to. The Ecopoints had bent more toward the majesty of nature. This was not majestic so much as awesome—being so removed from all she’d known could evoke no feeling but awe.

With the ice crunching under her clawed boots, Angela felt the same isolation Genji must have. She had made him awesome, too, and he had fled Overwatch to come to grips with that awe. But better alive and altered than dead and absent, as was Gabriel Reyes. If the Ecopoint held nothing but the dead, Angela swore to herself, that would be the end of her involvement.

— — — — —

The ruin of the Ecopoint had been scattered down the slopes of Vinson Massif by years of polar storms. Snow had covered and uncovered the wreckage like shifting sands. Glass glittered unnaturally bright upon the white landscape, and the cryogenic pods breached the surface like the blue fingers of a long buried climber. They placed a beacon, so that another team could come and clear away the remaining wreckage.

The last operational research drone was half-buried in snow. Its solar panels canted to catch the weak late-night sun so that it could continue to broadcast its distress. Most of the pods were cracked, their brine staining the snow brilliant blue. These Angela declared a complete and immediate loss, but demanded they be brought on descent regardless. The remaining pair had depowered, but recently enough that there was still a chance.

Mei’s was one of the pair.

Ziegler remembered her with every retreating step, cradling the drone against her stomach. She had always seemed younger than her actual age—but Overwatch had that effect on people. On Jack, certainly, and on Gabriel. And the grey had only begun to streak her platinum hair once the Watchpoints had been shuttered.

Their specialties hadn’t seen much overlap. Still, she’d rubbed shoulders with the climatologist often enough to remember her. Her optimism—or at least her enthusiasm—had been boundless. Angela wondered what hope Mei-Ling Zhao had clung to when she’d gone under. She wondered what Dr. Zhao would think of the world she awoke to.

— — — — —

But first she would have to wake.

The descent was a simple enough matter, even slogging the cryo tubes behind them on runnered sleighs. Angela took her own shifts in the cycle, shouldering the weight like duty. They could see the jet from a long way off. When it loomed above them, it felt like salvation. Like blessed shelter. For her; for them. The transfer was handled carefully, every tube nestled into place and secured before there was any thought of departure. With on-board power from the Candid, equilibrium was established for the remaining pair of tubes. It would last long enough to leave Antarctica.

At her insistence, they filed their flight plan for Christchurch. Angela felt more confident about the medical facilities there than anywhere else they had fuel and time enough to get to. Even so, in flight, the temperatures in the tubes rose by some few degrees.

The wake cycles were untenable, Angela discovered, would have to be regulated manually. In a Christchurch hospital, Dr. Zhao and her colleague were transferred to antifreeze baths. The first stage of their revival began.

During that time, Angela found she had little to do. The UN team departed for debriefing. They had to send someone to the hospital to conduct Angela’s interview, because she would go nowhere else while the work was ongoing.

One of her patients died anyway, leaving her alone with what was once—and she desperately hoped would be again—Doctor Mei-Ling Zhao.

That had always been her problem, hadn’t it?

There was a holoscreen in the patient room, and Angela allowed it to interview itself for hours while she waited. It was comforting to hear human—and Omnic—voices again. She didn’t recognize any of the talk-show hosts, nor most of the stars, but it was a relief nonetheless. And it was better than the news.

Angela drafted and discarded several emails to Genji, laden down with photos. In a fit of restlessness, she called him.  
“Moshi-moshi,” he said.  
That was enough, and she hung up. She would explain herself later, she promised, and made a few more passes at email.

General Adawe was easier to write to. Angela thanked her for whatever favor she’d called in, and told her it was now her duty to see the late climatologists buried with the honors due them as heroes. As Overwatch operatives.

 _When will this end, Angela?_  Adawe had written back.

The answer was easy: when the last member of Overwatch drew her last breath.

— — — — —

With equilibrium achieved at minus two degrees centigrade, Dr. Ziegler elected to begin phase two. She tried not to think of her patient as Mei, or even as Dr. Zhao. Perhaps she’d spent too long thinking of the last one as Gabriel.

She administered a cocktail of heparin and nanobiotics while the Omnic perfusionist broached the patient to the pump. Between her and the anaesthesiologist, along with the nurses on standby, Angela felt like she was commanding a small army.

Was that what she missed?

No, she was still able to do that in her hospital: bark orders and direct treatment that saved lives. Oversee and direct research.

She hadn’t put on her Valkyrie suit in Antarctica, nor afterward. She hadn’t worn it since Geneva at all. She thought of it, sometimes, but always ended up scolding herself. Did she need that kind of thrill in her life? This was its own high-wire act. They drained away the first-stage bath, replacing it with saline that could be more readily brought up to temperature.

Slush became blood, which flowed without lungs or heart. Ice became flesh.

— — — — —

Mei-Ling Zhao became herself.

A few days after surgery—after her intubations were removed and she was awake more than asleep—the doctor went to see Mei. The holoscreen flashed with color, but was mute.  
“How are you feeling?” she asked. The question came by rote, but she paused to linger over it.  
“Warm,” Mei laughed. “Not bad, all things considered.”  
“Do you remember me?” Angela asked, surprised to hear the tremor in her voice.  
“Of course I do,” Mei said. “Dr. Ziegler. We were stationed together at Watchpoint Geneva.”  
Angela sighed, sinking into the chair beside the bed. She killed the holoscreen, making a quiet note that if this was how Mei had found out about things, someone would be held accountable. Angela folded her hands over her lap, then unfolded them. She looked not at her patient, but her colleague, and extended a hand. “I need to talk to you,” Angela said. “About Overwatch.”


End file.
